Parasitic Computing

b0r0din writes: "CNN has this article about a way to force computers to solve complex computational problem using the checksum algorithm used by the TCP/IP protocol. For more technical details, see their website." You probably thought learning TCP/IP was useless. No! You can use it to make an extremely inefficient computer...

Comments

This looks possible, but why?

[phoenix_orb]

This will make an EXTREMLY slow computer, and if anyone out there knows anything about routing (which I am sure you do :) The time it would take to recieve and compile all of the data would take longer and require more bandwith than would be viable on the economy of scale.

Example --- need to send 4,000,000 packets out and recieve the TCP packet back.

To do this with any speed, and also to not lose a fair majority of packets, you have to have a huge backhaul.. (T-3, OC3 or larger) TCP will not continue sending packet so you will loses them. Cost for large backhaul. $4800 month, (as by what my company chages..)

4,800 x 12 $57,600

So for one year of a huge pipe to the net you will be paying 57,600 (through my provider)

This still will not fix latent packets that never get back to the user, or any other problems.. (such as someone on your network running bearshare and eating all of your bandwidth)

Now lets look at the amount of money used for that large amount of bandwidth.

$57,600 for the amount we could have spent on that line in one year we can build a beowulf cluster with 30 nodes (and that is being very liberal on the cost of the nodes)

Now, looking at the article that I read, it seems as if the computing style using TCP/IP is very very ineffiecint.

Personally, for the amount needed to make this work, on the scale of actually getting any real work done, I would much rather build a Athlon Beowulf cluster.

This looks like in reality this could only be implimented in the real world as a new type of DOS attack.